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J.K. Rowling: rock bottom became the foundation

Unemployed, a single mother and with a book turned down by publishers, J.K. Rowling said at Harvard that rock bottom became the foundation of her life.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Before Harry Potter was one of the best-selling books in history, it was a manuscript in a folder, written by a woman who, in her own words, had "failed on an epic scale".

The no

On June 5, 2008, in the Harvard University commencement address, J.K. Rowling described where she stood seven years after finishing university: a marriage that had ended quickly, jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. By any conventional measure, she said, she was the biggest failure she knew.

The book heard no as well. The most cited number is twelve publishers that rejected the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone before Bloomsbury, a small publisher in London, accepted it. The story goes that the publisher's chairman gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, Alice, and that she asked for the rest. The first print run, in 1997, was small.

What they did

The book came out in June 1997. The series became seven books, films and one of the greatest publishing phenomena of all time.

But what Rowling said at Harvard matters more than the numbers. She explained that failure stripped away everything inessential, and that, set free from the fear of failure because her greatest fear had already come true, she began directing all her energy into the only work that mattered. And she summed it up in one sentence:

"And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

In the same speech: "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all."

What this has to do with Bairo

This is perhaps the sentence closest to Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's rule for life. He says it another way: no is the foundation of yes. When his partners pushed him out of his own business, he found the pain and, instead of running from it, made it the foundation. Not as an open wound. As a floor.

Rowling spoke of rock bottom as a foundation. Bairo speaks of no as a brick. It isn't the same life, nor the same size, and he asks for no comparison. It's the same discovery, made by two people who hit the ground and decided to build on top of it.

There's another point in common: Rowling speaks of the daughter she adored as her reason to carry on. Bairo also speaks of the silent arithmetic of an immigrant father, in The sun is for everyone.

Read: No is the foundation of yes · Fifty lives

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